Kingdom of Conscience

Jordan Peterson was a relatively unknown tenured Canadian professor who spent 13 to 15 years writing his masterpiece Maps of Meaning, working on it roughly 3 hours per day, rewriting by his own estimate every line 50 times, investing roughly 16,000 hours over the period while he taught college students. He was also influenced strongly by Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and studied authoritarian regimes while in clinical training interviewing inmates of maximum-security prisons to identify the personality factors behind voluntary participation in evil.

Ten years ago on September 27th he spoke out on YouTube against a federal Canadian bill he viewed as mandating compelled speech — a red flag of encroaching authoritarianism. He said the quiet thing out loud, and not only within academic circles, he identified the danger in plain language, in public, and predicted where it would lead. And because of that very public breach, he endured the loss of standing among his colleagues, censure from his own institution and forced re-education as the only remedy to maintain the psychological license required by his profession to continue his clinical practice.

In 1981, Rupert Sheldrake published A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance. The prestigious scientific journal Nature, in its review, asked: “a book for burning?” Sheldrake made the case that biological growth and behaviour are guided by morphic fields, where past forms and behaviours influence present organisms across time and space. Sheldrake argues that natural regularities are better understood as evolving habits rather than fixed, immutable laws.

In 2013, he delivered a TEDx talk where he identifies ten axioms of the scientific establishment that are better asked as questions. The reaction from that establishment, as in 1981, was to pull his talk — The Science Delusion — off YouTube with no discussion. The suppression itself caused his TEDx talk to be viewed over 8 million times, far greater than if the priests and scribes of materialism had simply ignored his heresy. Sheldrake has never stopped asking his questions in the open: Is memory inherent in nature? Are the laws of physics more like habits the universe has acquired? He has conducted four decades of experiments, results published whichever way they fell — mapping a frontier idea held at its own weight, never inflated, never abandoned. The Wall honors his stand.

In the late 1950s a rhetoric teacher at a small college in Bozeman, Montana was handed a curriculum that told him to grade his students on the quality of their work. He looked at the word and realised nobody in the building could say what it meant. So Robert Pirsig asked his students, and they could not say either, and the word kept slipping out of everyone’s hands. He dove into understanding and research. It took him back through Aristotle to Plato and the day the Good was moved into a realm of Forms, and it left him with the insight that broke the faculty: Quality arrives before the word. The knowing hits before the why.

That same semester the college was close to losing its accreditation and his students were frightened the university would disappear. He told them the real university is a state of mind — a living body of reason carried from one generation to the next by people — and that a building can be emptied while the administrators go on signing forms. It was a lecture that would lead to a path that would break his mind. Years earlier a science program had expelled him for asking where a hypothesis comes from. He pursued the essence of Quality until his mind snapped. In 1961 they committed him and gave him electroshock intended to erase the part of him that would not stop — the part he later named Phaedrus. He came back a different man. In 1968 he put his eleven-year-old son on the back of a motorcycle and rode west from Minnesota. The book that came off that road was turned down by a hundred and twenty-one publishers, and the philosophy journals never reviewed it. He rediscovered the Quality that he pursued in his novels and touched millions. The Wall honors his stand.